‘UIDAI will never have any data that will impact your privacy’
AB Pandey, CEO, Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) talks about reasons for Aadhaar becoming mandatory and the security of the whole exercise. Edited excerpts.
Why is Aadhaar becoming mandatory?
Aadhaar gives a credible identity, compared to the quality of the various identity documents that are used traditionally. Because what we have seen in many studies where you take any identity document, immediately lot of fake, duplicate and bogus documents starts floating in the market. And then it creates its own complications. If the fake identity is used to get subsidies or service deliveries, it leads to leakage of that money, funds get diverted.
So are we in the process of getting all the information related to, say, my tax return, bank details at one place, by keying in my Aadhaar details?
UIDAI believes in collecting minimal information and (keeping) optimal ignorance. So UIDAI will only tell the agency that this Aadhaar number and this finger print is matching. For what purpose they use this, that information we don’t ask for. Therefore, UIDAI will never have any data that will impact your privacy. Your data will remain only with I-T department or with banks, along with your Aadhaar.
How secure is Aadhaar?
This is the question a lot of people have been asking. There are two sides to this. One is the security inside Aadhaar, and I would say that yes it is secure. But does that mean that we should relax? No. Because the nature of security threats always keeps changing. So we have to show absolute vigilance and take every possible measure to constantly assess the threats and address those threats. .
Now, what about the security of the people or the organisations such as banks and others who are using Aadhaar, because ultimately people will use Aadhaar. So we have got a very strong law. And the law provides lots of restrictions on the organisation that are using Aadhaar, like: what they should do, how they should improve their security, how to ensure that the data they collect will not get misused.